Mobile devices today provide a consumer with a wealth of functions in a single unit. Such devices are increasingly being used for the consumption of multimedia content, such as video clips and music. Various techniques have been developed to enable more efficient delivery of the content to the consumer's mobile device.
One technique commonly used is streaming, where content is delivered to the device at the same time as it being consumed. As streaming is a unicast service, a separate stream is required for each device being streamed to, and thus available network bandwidth can quickly become used up. A permanent connection is also required to a device for users to watch content. Streaming is thus a costly approach and also prone to failure, for example when the device moves out of the coverage area of the given network. There is also usually a lengthy start-up delay as content is requested and buffered prior to being rendered.
An alternative approach is to side-load or download the content. This is where the content is delivered to a device and stored in advance of it being consumed. If the delivery of content is done intelligently (i.e. only the content the user is likely to be interested in) then this can prove beneficial. When content is consumed it will not suffer from the usual “re-buffering” issues associated with streaming and can be delivered continuously.
A downside of the side-loading approach is that the user has to wait for the content to arrive in its entirety before it can be consumed. Furthermore, as content is stored locally on the device, side-loading can result in storage capacity problems if the user has a lot of content on the device.